This article explores the metaphorical models English speakers employ in their understanding of transgenderism. Transgender is the term ascribed to those who have begun or completed a change in their sex characteristics from male to female or female to male. Using both qualitative and quantitative measures, I examine an archive of narrative data and a transition-specific corpus to show how spoken and written narrative support a spatially based representation of gender identity and transition. Two robust models are revealed in the (...) data, each carrying a set of suppositions consequential to how speakers understand their lived experience. I show how metaphor-evoking trigger lexemes relate to each model and can be used jointly to demonstrate conceptual salience. This investigation should be seen as part of an ever-growing body of research directed at revealing the unconscious assumptions, which organize speakers’ comprehension of complex topics with political relevance (cf. Charteris-Black, 2004; Lakoff, 2002,.. (shrink)

This study concerns the distribution of metaphorical lexis in discrete syntactic constructions. Source and target seed language from established conceptual metaphors in economic discourse is used to catalogue the specific patterns of how metaphorical pairs align in five syntactic constructions: A-NP, N-N, NP-of-NP, V-NP, and X is Y. Utilizing the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the examination includes 12 frequent metaphorical target triggers combined with 84 source triggers to produce 2,016 ordered collocations, i.e. investment freeze and turbulent market. Through detailed (...) type and token counts, results confirm that source domains function as conceptual material used to structure the target domain and disproportionally fill syntactic positions associated with predication, Studies in cognitive corpus linguistics. Frankfurt: Peter Lang Publishers; Sullivan, Karen. 2013. Frames and constructions in metaphoric language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing). Given a lexeme’s origin – source or target – when used in source-target metaphors, syntactic alignment can be predicted, market climate is metaphorical, climate market is not. Exceptions to these strong tendencies are explained through genre-specific lexicalization processes in which predicate denoting terms like bubble establish themselves as domain modifiers in economic jargon. Through quantitative techniques to gage metaphorical conventionality and lexical versatility, corpus methodology is used to define and inform the value of frequency effects in cataloguing and understanding metaphorical lexicalization. (shrink)